I tend to listen more to opinions when people have placed money on their espoused outcome—having “skin in the game”, as Nicholas Taleb calls it in his latest book. However, this robotics developer seems to have gone one better. He literally has skin in the game. Good scientists aren’t supposed to experiment on themselves, but […]
Robot brothels
I’m not sure if robot brothels actually exist, but it seems that we are OK with people visiting them. Two surveys run by the University of Helsinki found that the majority of respondents found it was morally acceptable—as long as you are single. One of the major barriers to the wider use of robots (such […]
Google Dataset Search
Google have created a tool to make it easier to discover datasets—Google Dataset Search. One potential downside is that it requires dataset owners to provide metadata. While the Google brand means that this might get some traction, not all dataset owners are motivated to help the cause. Publication of datasets is now mandated by some […]
Amara’s Law
The current hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning brings to mind Amara’s Law. We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Jupyter Notebooks—love ’em or hate ’em?
Jupyter Notebooks are popular with data scientists. Microsoft even offers a free, hosted, “no-install” service for Python, R and F#. However, there are some downsides to notebooks—mostly to do with software engineering best practices. Joel Grus gave a provocative talk at JupyterCon 2018 entitled “I Don’t Like Notebooks”. Yihui Xie then followed up with a […]